Downloading Acrobat Form with Reader issue

This is (was) considered a feature, so that form data would not be lost if a user navigated away from the form an later returned. This was accomplished by saving a temporary FDF file on the user's system that would then be used to repopulated the fields if the form was reopened. Adobe allowed the user to control whether the cached FDF got created through a preference setting: Edit > Preferences > Forms > General > Keep forms data temporarily available on diskAdobe eventually considered this behavior to be undesirable, so Acrobat (Reader) no longer caches form data this way.

You can also set the nocache document property using JavaScript, which controls this behavior for a single document. For example, you could place the code in a document-level script the executes when the form is opened. The nocache property was removed in version 9 since version 9 no longer is able to cache form data. So if you want to control this through code, your code should first check the version or test for the existence of this property before attempting to set it.

I'm a novice with creating forms. I've plugged java script onto fields and buttons but not at the page level.

How and what script woud I use to test the version then set nocache to true?

In looking at the documentation, I see I was wrong about the need to do version checking or feature detection. You can simply do:

nocache = true;


Place the code in a document-level JavaScript, outside of a function definition. Or you can place it in the initial page's Page Open action.

You may also want to turnoff the auto complete for the form in a similar manner.


The end users should not save the form back to the server.

If needed one could even add a form reset script to clear the form.

As noted this would be a document level script outside of the function definition.